Libtools

I don’t know how the phrase ‘tag cloud’ originated, and I really don’t have anything against it except that, well, they are word frequencies clustered into clouds. It might be neat to explore word rivers, or word wells, or word mountains, or — wait, I’m having flashbacks to the dada movement and concrete poetry — so let’s leave our heads in the clouds for a moment.

Clouds aren’t good things when we want to make clear conceptual distinctions. When we want to clarify something, and help someone navigate an information space, we want to make an effort to dispel ambiguities. We want murkiness (and cloudiness) to be replaced by clarity of thought and precision.

Sometimes we really do want things to be fuzzy and ill-defined. And if that is the case, then a cloudy kind of randomness might be acceptable, fun, interesting. More art, less retrieval. Randomness doesn’t scale, though, in terms of navigation or findability or retrievability. For me that kind of randomness is like the eclectic mix of a rummage or garage sale, which are admittedly popular things, but that kind of fragmentation is a time waster for me. Experimentation on a grand scale like the Photosynth demo (TED talk) a while back by Blaise Aguera y Arcas is super interesting, though, but a wee bit out of reach at the moment.

I emphatically support the idea of user-generated tags to augment controlled vocabulary files and to greatly increase lead-in vocabulary. It would not be difficult to differentiate user tags from authorized headings in terms of presentation (different font, size, color, etc.) Bates wrote of the need for an end-user thesaurus quite some time ago, which does not appear to have gotten much traction (and which just shows how much ahead of her time her research always is).

In contradistinction to clouds, the current work happening on earth right now in the Topic Maps community (e.g., Danenbarger; Oh; others) seems to me to be on target and gratifying.

As for the ultimate utility and longevity of tag clouds, especially given the abundance of long, well-established and justifiable human-scale metaphors associated with this meteorological phenomena?

Haven’t the foggiest